Data fusion techniques for biomedical informatics and clinical decision support

Data fusion can be used to combine multiple data sources or modalities to facilitate enhanced visualization, analysis, detection, estimation, or classification. Data fusion can be applied at the raw-data, feature-based, and decision-based levels. Data fusion applications of different sorts have been built up in areas such as statistics, computer vision and other machine learning aspects. It has been employed in a variety of realistic scenarios such as medical diagnosis, clinical decision support, and structural health monitoring. This dissertation includes investigation and development of methods to perform data fusion for cervical cancer intraepithelial neoplasia (CIN) and a clinical decision support system. The general framework for these applications includes image processing followed by feature development and classification of the detected region of interest (ROI). Image processing methods such as k-means clustering based on color information, dilation, erosion and centroid locating methods were used for ROI detection. The features extracted include texture, color, nuclei-based and triangle features. Analysis and classification was performed using feature- and decision-level data fusion techniques such as support vector machine, statistical methods such as logistic regression, linear discriminant analysis and voting algorithms --Abstract, page iv

TelsNet: temporal lesion network embedding in a transformer model to detect cervical cancer through colposcope images

Cervical cancer ranks as the fourth most prevalent malignancy among women globally. Timely identification and intervention in cases of cervical cancer hold the potential for achieving complete remission and cure. In this study, we built a deep learning model based on self-attention mechanism using transformer architecture to classify the cervix images to help in diagnosis of cervical cancer. We have used techniques like an enhanced multivariate gaussian mixture model optimized with mexican axolotl algorithm for segmenting the colposcope images prior to the Temporal Lesion Convolution Neural Network (TelsNet) classifying the images. TelsNet is a transformer-based neural network that uses temporal convolutional neural networks to identify cancerous regions in colposcope images. Our experiments show that TelsNet achieved an accuracy of 92.7%, with a sensitivity of 73.4% and a specificity of 82.1%. We compared the performance of our model with various state-of-the-art methods, and our results demonstrate that TelsNet outperformed the other methods. The findings have the potential to significantly simplify the process of detecting and accurately classifying cervical cancers at an early stage, leading to improved rates of remission and better overall outcomes for patients globally